We got a chance to grab some quality hands on time with Real Racing 3 today. We got about thirty minutes of video we'll be posting over the coming days. The game, much as we expected, it's pretty amazing! It looks great, it plays great, and our concerns about the free to play model were somewhat assuaged.

We'll have more on the free to play model once we get more time with it. But you can at least rest assured it's not super intrusive. It exists pretty much as we guessed last week, but with less friction and fewer pay walls than I anticipated.

The free to play energy system in Real Racing 3 works like this. You earn cash when racing. When you race, and damage your car, you have to pay for those repairs. The better you are, the less damage you do to your car. To fix you car, you have to use the cash you earn. You also have to pay for upgrades and new cars. While the damage to your car does affect the power of it, you can chose to not repair it and keep racing.

Also, typical to most free to play games there are two currencies included. Dollars and gold coins. Dollars pay for repairs, upgrades, etc., the gold coins speed things up, reducing your wait time.

Repairs and upgrades take time to complete. How long depends on how much damage or how big of an upgrade it is. You can speed them up by using gold coins. You only earn gold coins by leveling up in the game or by buying them with real money via in-app purchase.

All in all, not that intrusive for free to play games. But I can't totally give it a pass as the device I was playing on had millions in cash and thousands of gold coins. That doesn't give me a good feel for how fast you earn money or how fast you are forced to spend it. We'll have more when we get a chance to try it on our devices.

Here's a quick demo of Real Racing 3, featuring the first full race seen anywhere. We'll have more videos coming soon with more on the cars in the game, the repair and upgrade system, and more. But first, here's 4:26 of Real Racing 3 bliss.

Real Racing 3 launches as a Universal app on February 28th. We hope to have a promo code soon so we can start setting some hot laps. When we get one, we'll have more in-depth info.